


Do Not Go Gentle

by irinokat



Category: Pacific Rim
Genre: ADHD, Pre-Canon, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2013-10-16
Packaged: 2017-12-29 14:48:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1006672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irinokat/pseuds/irinokat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hey Hermann, it's been a few days, right? I think we need to sit down and have a talk - yeah, yeah, let's talk, because I don't want you to get the wrong idea about the things you saw in my head that night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do Not Go Gentle

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes words just need to come out of us. Let me know what you think; I was thinking of just publishing this whole thing as one piece when I finished it, but I think it'd be a bit too long for that, so chapters.

_Do not go gentle into that good night._

Every once in a while, I get that line going through my head, and nothing I do can drown it out. I can’t remember the rest of the poem, song, whatever. (There’s something about it that seems like it should be set to music.) I do remember the voice of my AP English teacher reading it out, emphasizing the wrong syllables, sounding each word like it was a foreign language, but I don’t remember her name. I don’t remember most of my high school teachers. Why would I, when I was in such a rush to get out?

I know you could never understand why my father would choose to move to Boston, why he would leave Germany behind. Perhaps Bavaria is better than Berlin, nice country streets and close-knit families and old values of honor and glory. Maybe it’s the real Germany, more real than what my father experienced in a big, unfeeling city. (I’ve heard him say before that Bavaria is less Germany than Austria is, but I’m not one to argue with map lines.)

And maybe Boston seems like a nonsensical place for us to move to, if he was escaping city life, but where else could we go? Gunter was in Boston for those first few years, helping Dad escape the judgment, the icy stares from friends, the questions about fatherhood and responsibility and wanting a child.

Don’t worry. I know I was unwanted. How can you not be, when your own mother leaves you in your father’s arms without so much as a word goodbye? How can you not be, when your father becomes an outcast from his own family for the crime of loving a woman and making a mistake? How can you not be, when you spend your childhood set apart, made fun of and bullied first for your accent, then for the words that come out once you force your voice into new patterns? Teased for being “lazy” and “unmotivated” and “gifted but troubled?”

Yeah, it’s hard for you to believe. The guy with six doctorates by the time most people are getting their first real job couldn’t get his homework done in first grade. ADHD is a bitch that way, isn’t it? At least they caught it early, I guess, even if Dad spent five years after convinced I was just lazy. Maybe it was a good thing that I spent all of elementary school running laps around the playground and answering every question whether they wanted me to or not and thinking, thinking, thinking, so I would be happy when they finally handed me Ritalin, so I wouldn’t mind feeling my thoughts lock up in my brain and my words freeze in my throat. Yeah, I was quiet once. I know it’s hard to believe. But the tolerance builds up and remembering so many pills a day is a pain and medication gets more expensive with more cities destroyed so I don’t always stay on schedule. At least they think it’s important enough for my head to work here that the PPDC’s willing to cover it.

So they gave me the medicine and I got my work done, done almost a little too well, they questioned my father at first. And then they realized with his Berliner style and his shiny homemade guitar and his loose grasp on English grammar that there was no way he could have written my English papers or my science reports, and Uncle Gunter was traveling by then, doing engineering work back home in Germany while Dad got a job at the grocery store and watched he house. So when they finally figured out that I was smart – yeah, it was me, I wrote fucking dissertations on whales in seventh grade and argued with my history professors about the finer points of Austro-Hungarian wars and read Dostoyevsky while my teachers went over the parts of speech for the fourth fucking time – they figured out I was smart and they pushed me forward one grade, then two, and then suddenly I’d taken every AP class my high school taught and a few community college courses and they let me graduate early with no idea what the hell I was doing.

And, y’know, getting out of high school? Awesome. There were some girls who thought it was totally adorable that the little thirteen-year-old genius took classes with them and there were teachers going on and on about how great it was that I was moving so fast, but that does nothing to balance out the assholes who wanted to see the physics of fitting me in a gym bag or a crowded locker. It doesn’t stop the asshole teachers who’re just there to coach football and tell you you’re lying when you prove you know better than them. And it doesn’t suddenly make college better when you’re just barely getting over puberty but you’re getting better grades than people five years older than you.

Whoever said these are the best years of our lives are lying or the sadsacks who pushed me around like I was a sack of dogshit.

_Do not go gentle into that good night._

Oh, what, you saw me protesting, you saw me drop out, you saw me with my first tattoos? Yeah, I was a fucking idiot in college, who isn’t? Add on the age difference and it’s amazing I didn’t kill myself, if you ask my psychiatrists. I didn’t actually drop out, I just thought about it a lot. I thought about dying, I thought about driving until I flew over the ocean and back to Gunter, I thought about switching to art back when I thought my note doodles were masterpieces, I thought about being grabbed by crowds and pulled apart and dissected until no one could tell I was me anymore.

You ever hear that anxiety and depression are pretty common in ADD kids? They don’t talk about shit like that. They don’t warn you that the medicine might stop working and that your brain may turn against you even harder than it already has or that no one likes that fucking asshole know-it-all who’s two, three years younger than everyone else and doesn’t know how to shut up about it. I tried joining groups, making friends, shouting for and against things, but then I’d say one thing wrong and then five more things trying to make up for it and suddenly Newton Geiszler’s just that strange, smart loner kid with the weird name, he’s so antisocial, always putting his foot in his mouth, mustn’t it be so sad that he’s alone? And then they’d try to get to know me until I told them that God was a fucking asshole and that gender was the dumbest construct society had stuck with and that animal guts were amazing, have you seen the way a chambered nautilus’s heart works when it swims or the way parasites drain their prey?

So yeah, college sucked just as bad as high school when it came to people, but at least the classes were good. I got on the fast track, got in good with my professors, taught a little bit, kept taking classes, kept taking classes, kept taking classes. I think they only asked me to stay on as a professor while I started on my fourth PhD because I’d become a fixed point on the MIT campus by then, always studying at the same table in the same coffee shop when I wasn’t at my same spot in the same lab. Dr. Geiszler, second youngest student, youngest professor, what a dream. I stuck to it because what else was I supposed to do? Learning was what I was good at, learning was all I had done. I was built to research shit. The human body is my playground, bitch, let me show you how to make it function more efficiently. If I can’t make you like me through being me, then at least I can blow your fucking socks out of the water with my godlike (more Frankensteinlike) abilities to regrow tissue and rebuild DNA just with the power of my mind and science, motherfucker.

_Rage, rage against the dying of the light._

That’s another line, isn’t it? I don’t know why that’s caught in the corners of my brain. I know you think poetry is bullshit – yeah, yeah, you’d never phrase it that way, I know, but I’m the one who’s talking – but there’s something beautiful about meter and scansion and diction all coming together in the spoken word. Everything has a rhythm to it, right? Animal movements, big cities, society, our hearts. I’m the child of two musicians, I grew up with a music engineer, I was born with music moving in my soul, staccato beats pounding themselves out in my brain, the drums, the drums, the drums… No, that wasn’t a Doctor Who reference, but the Master was great in those stories, right?

The kaiju have their own rhythm, too, you know that. You studied the way they came into our world, the way they tried to destroy us. That first day Trespasser came through, man, remember the way they used to memorialize 9/11? Ah, probably not, maybe you saw stuff on the internet. I think the only reason they didn’t do the same thing with San Fransisco was because it kept happening, and kept happening, until we couldn’t ignore it anymore. We didn’t know back then that it really was a terrorist attack, just one from a completely different world, on a much larger scale. And now you’re going to tell me it’s insensitive to compare the kaiju to suicide bombers, yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve heard, but it did pull the world together, right? They terrified us. We couldn’t understand them, what they were doing, why we were here. We killed them but they came here to die – to kill us and then to die so their masters could take over. I don’t know what else to call them.

Okay, I’m lying, I do know what to call them. Fascinating. Beautiful. Awful, in the old biblical sense and in the modern way. I knew the moment I realized that Trespasser wasn’t just amazing CGI that I needed to get my hands on this thing, turn it inside out, found out what made it think, what made it tick. I may or may not have begged to join the volunteers helping to clean up the coast and rebuild the rubble. I may or may not have started my first papers on Kaiju Blue during weeks of trying to filter it from the ocean. I may or may not have screamed at the government workers when they quarantined the site where she went down and wouldn’t let me look at the parts. Not that there was much left. Radiation’s just as bad for aliens as it is for us in the right dosage, I guess… 


End file.
